Ain't No Feud Like A Food Feud. Or Maybe There's No Feud At All

For some, she's a lively, well-informed foodie who offers great discounts and tips on her blog, on a weekly radio show on CNN 650 AM (Proposed Station Motto: You've Probably Never Heard Of Us), on local TV morning shows and on her Twitter.

For others, she's a bit of a joke, someone who is pompous and gets too cozy with the restaurants that support her.

The Houston Chronicle's Alison Cook, for instance, decided last Saturday to listen to Stone's show for the first time and live-Twitter it. Sample tweets:

-- "wow, so far @cleverleys's show is way more about cleverley than anything else. Me, me, me; my my my. Oh my"

-- ""Ooh, I just pulled an earring out of my bra." --@cleverleys. 20 minutes in and still almost no food.restaurant content"

-- "34 minutes of unbelievableness. Not sure how much more I can take."

-- "How many more dramatic readings of dictionary food definitions will I have to hear?

Lance Zierlein is best known as the co-host of the morning sports-talk show on The Game, 1560 AM, the hands-down funniest sports-talk show in the market. He decided to do a local food show of his own, and things went to hell.

Or maybe they didn't, depending on who you ask.

Zierlein's show is Southbound Food, self-described as "Rowdy. Hilarious. Edgy. Irreverent." A co-host is Bryan Caswell of REEF.

Shortly after the show debuted, Zierlein began telling people that Stone was mounting a campaign against it. She had her supporters calling in to KGOW bosses to say Zierlein was drunk on the air, the claim went, and she had called Tony Vallone a "traitor" for appearing on Zierlein's show. The Houston foodie community began taking sides.

Southbound Food answered with a parody of Stone's show, the first podcast from September 12 in the above link. (Over Vivaldi's Four Seasons, a Leonard Pinth-Garnell character intoned, "What we're going to do is take food, and the excitement and enjoyment of it, and try to suck all of it out of it to get to the core, which is the protein, which is the vegetables...")

So what is the deal?

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Zierlein tells Hair Balls: "To be honest with you, I don't really know much about what Cleverley is. I don't know if it is the name of a show or if it is a person or what it is. I was told there is a different food show in town, but I had never heard of it and I've been on Houston radio for over twelve years. I've heard the other show tried to make something up about Southbound Food to try and get us in trouble, but that tactic failed."

And Stone tells Hair Balls: "There's a feud? The things you have heard are absolutely false. They never happened. I don't know Lance Zierlein. I have no knowledge of his imbibing and I don't know who his boss is. I would never say anything derogatory about my dear friend Tony Vallone. I hope this clears things up and puts to rest any inaccuracies you have heard."

So there you go. No one knows anyone else in this alleged Battle of the Foodies.

We can only hope Tony Vallone can stay as safe as Switzerland in this supposed war.

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